The course will discuss a topic that reflects major intellectual anxieties in contemporary cultural anthropology. The topic embraces cultural perplexities that recent dramatic transformations in Central and Eastern Europe and the progress towards European integration have evoked. These perplexities have reconstructed concepts and classifications constitutive of social and political forms of inclusions and exclusions within and among societies of Europe as well as Europe and the rest of the world.

The course also pursues the goal of testing the theoretical, analytical and critical potentials of the anthropological inquiry that has recently been acknowledged in Central and East European academic circles as well. The composition of the resource team is to intensify reflexive cross-currents among the Anglo-Saxon, Mediterranean, German, and various Central European traditions of thoughts in anthropology and the related disciplinary fields.

The course is built on the underlying assumption that societies involved in the European unification project and societies of Central and Eastern Europe are linked by various historical conjunctions, transnational and subnational flow of people and knowledge, and exchanges of thought and culture. Thus, transformations in societies of Central and East European countries should be investigated in various perspectives that are not constrained narrowly to the region. The notion of Europe, including images, hopes and fears associated with it in various legal, political and cultural debates, creates one of these perspectives. Experiences and concerns of late (also called as post-, second, post-welfare, etc.) modernity, which cut across different socio-political and national divisions within and outside Europe, shape the other perspective.